You are not using a standards compliant browser. Because of this you may notice minor glitches in the rendering of this page. Please upgrade to a compliant browser for optimal viewing:
FirefoxInternet Explorer 7Safari (Mac and PC)

A med & grad student who used to work the line in LA, NYC, SF and Napa talking about the science of cooking and cooking with science. Harold McGee's On Food And Cooking - The Science and Lore of the Kitchen never satisfied my kitchen curiosity and more than one Chef grew exasperated with my asking "Why?" I'll try to stay on topic, but you may see a kvetch or two about the school & hospital.

My posts are presented as opinion and commentary and do not represent the views of LabSpaces Productions, LLC, my employer, or my educational institution.

Well, so emr software has it's problems, not like making them public wouldn't cause them any more trouble as it normally would in a paranoid mind, as this yannisguerra's perspective here. I've delv. . .Read More

Your posts always make me so hungry and its 9am! I saw that amazon now has reruns of "The French Chef" available for streaming. It made me want to go back and check some of them out. I remember. . .Read More

I feel your pain. It is really bad. Even worse when half of those pages are non important informations (like 5 copies of the same lab, including who ordered it, when, where, etc)
So wastefu. . .Read More

I hate seeing thick patient charts. They're unweildy, and if you're carrying a stack of them they tend to slide around. Sometimes crap pops ut of them. The pages are held together by brass fasteners, and constantly flipping through pages eventually tears pages. Then you have to use tape to fix the tears. And punch them back through those brass fasteners.

And the absolute worst part is that thick charts are still common. Especially with new patients. Why? Because when a patient moves from one office/hospital to another, and if the new office doesn't use the same exact EMR system as the previous place the digital records can't get transferred over. Not as a digital record anyway. Do you know what happens in that instance? Those records are printed. They don't always get printed at the new office or old office. Sometimes, they're printed at a "Health Information Exchange" which is basically a third party office that prints up digital records. These companies exist solely because they have multiple EMRs and will print all the electronic information to paper. And then mail off stacks of paper. Sometimes giant stacks of paper.

Now, I know what you're thinking. If you can install multiple instances of EMR software on a given system, why can't you just convert files ove . . . More

Mark Bittman at the NY Times has a great opinion piece up on the current food system in the United States. I read this thanks to the ever wonderful Maryn McKenna, who tweeted about Mark's piece. Now food legislation in the United States is tricky. On the one hand, there are the people who support better food as a means to better health. On the other hand, there are those, like Anthony Bourdain, who feel that our priority should be cheaper food for the poor. Sustainable agriculture works, but it is incredibly expensive, and out of reach for those hovering around the poverty level.

Bittman's idea is to tackle the argument at both ends. First by eliminating or severly reducing the subsidies to corn and soy. Corn and soy are two wonderful ingredients, but they're no longer used the way we think they are used. Both are turned into a raw material for processing into feed or plastics or fuel. Very little of the corn grown is the sweet corn we eat. Slightly more soy is turned into something edible for human consump . . . More